To think rent is so bloody unfair

[Tar19891]

My rent is 800 per month. A mortgage on the same value flat would be 450 per month. Not in London obviously. It’s not fair is it?

@Tar19891

Plus the landlord is building equity. Come on, we’re all adults as you say. Just admit to profiting off the situation

I make about £20 a month. I moved in with my partner and kept my own house for security. I have replaced the boiler this year , all carpets, decorated throughout and three washing machines in 8 years. I do everything immediately the agent tells me anything needs work.

[quote Nothappyatwork]@Blossomtoes they wouldn’t of needed to go to international private school if we hadn’t been abroad like keep up, come on[/quote]
And you wouldn’t have arrived here on the bones of your arse if they did. Credit us with some intelligence. If you’re going to make stuff up at least try and make it credible.

A mortgage comes with the responsibility of owning a home. Upkeep easily runs into the thousands. But I only see this perspective more clearly having gone from renter to home owner. Owning a home has had a greater monthly cost and far more stress.

@Tar19891

Okay! Further info needed. Flats are worth about 120k (one bed) and with a 15k deposit mortgage payments are about 450 per month.

Save up 15k then and stop whining 🤷🏼‍♀️

@BambinaJAS - indeed. And - at this point - I for one will be cheering as the idiotic middle classes get dragged into the mire as more and more of them fall into the income < expenses trap. People think their in actuality pathetic 80-100k incomes mean they can watch on the sidelines tutting 'how awful for the poor - darling, shall we order deliveroo?'

Just watch. This is going to get tasty.

Rents have been out of kilter in the UK for a long, long time. And all those people saying, "Why don't you just buy?", it's not the monthly payment that makes it impossible, it's the fact that these days you
need a minimum of a 10% deposit, and often more like 30% or 40%. If you're paying twice what a mortgage would cost, that's an extra £400, £500, £600 a month that then can't go into a deposit fund (or into keeping the economy running, either).

No amount of giving up your iPhone and your smashed avocado on toast is going to let you save the amount you need; and depending on where you iive, and whether you have the right connections from school or family or uni, it isn't always easy to just trot out and get a 2nd, 3rd, or 4th job to build up a deposit.

So if you're not in a position to inherit or the Bank of Mum and Dad can't help you, you're stuck. Even in traditionally cheaper areas like parts of Wales, the Midlands, and the North, where youused to be able to pick up a little doer-upper for £20k, what is happening more and more is that people from richer parts of the country, or able to remortgage their existing properties, are snapping them up.

In many parts of Europe people are perfectly happy to rent, and rents aren't quite as insane.

When I rented I regularly came up against prejudice from colleagues, who were all under the illusion that my monthly payment included council tax, utilities, and Internet as well as the rent. And recently my (now ex) hairdresser made a snarky comment about how renters don't look after their properties. If you've never had to rent, you don't know how lucky. you are.

@Rosewaterblossom

I'm not even a renter or a landlord but I know from growing up where everyone rented that most landlords will leave their property maintenance to the minimum they can get away with. New windows 🤣 New kitchens and bathrooms 🤣 Most begrudge changing the carpets between (long term) tenants. A new boiler? Only when the old one has died a death and the tenant has been left freezing for a few weeks will the landlord replace it.

And stamp duty/conveyancing fees/surveys are not ongoing fees that landlords pay as a monthly fee. Even after insurance/taxes etc, the profits they make over a year more than cover any extra bills. That and the equity they are gaining year after year.

Stop making it sound like landlords are poor victims just scraping by.. if it were that bad people wouldn't be buying to let and landlords would be selling their properties to get out of this awful situation they are in that are leaving them penniless. Peeerleease 🙄

This is my landlord.

Currently I have, a broken kickboard heater, broken window seals, no garden gate, doors hanging off due to no/not enough screws in the hinges, a broken electric fire, 16 year old carpet that’s slippy, a leaking roof (since 2019), damp throughout the downstairs, no thermostat (just live wires hanging from the wall), a back door that leaks water underneath and has a huge hole where the cat flap fell out and last year I had no heating nor hot water for over 12 weeks of the year.

And my personal favourite a bannister that I reported as needing fixing 12 times, which shocker didn’t get fixed. Then completely came out of the wall causing me to fall and break my leg, that was in November I’m still in the cast now.

My landlords response? A rent increase of £100 per calendar month.

I don’t particularly like landlords all that much.

@Jobseeker19

I have yet to meet a landlord who pays insurance.

You can’t get a mortgage unless you do and landlords insurance covers things like legal cover and eviction costs. I certainly pay it.

Granted you could only pay it when you refinance, but I don’t think it’s common practice to do that and you would definitely be in breach of your mortgage conditions if you didn’t have buildings insurance.

@Jalepenojello

A mortgage comes with the responsibility of owning a home. Upkeep easily runs into the thousands. But I only see this perspective more clearly having gone from renter to home owner. Owning a home has had a greater monthly cost and far more stress.

Far more stress?

A renting family with two kids can literally be on the street in two months.

That is stressful.

Maintaining a home is practically in another dimension of stress.

They’re also making a profit. Which is not a bad thing, necessarily, but it seems unfair when you are being profited from.

But you’re being profiteered from in every single thing. From the gas to heat your home to the food you buy to the clothes you wear.

And if you’re employed for a profit making company then you also profiteer from someone else buying your companies service or goods. That’s literally what you’re doing.

[quote Tar19891]@Chestofdraws I pay tenants insurance already. I appreciate that I don’t have to pay for cost of repairs but TBH they’re not 4.2k per year are they?[/quote]
The service charge on a property I own is £2200 a year. Once I factor in expenses I earn around 3k a year on my investment of £100000. That's 3 percent. Once interest rates reach 3 % I'll be selling up.

@SwanBuster

I'm creasing up at the idea of the miniscule amounts of tax being collected on landlords profits being seen as beneficial here.

The illiteracy about taxation and money we have is breathtaking.

Unless there is some loophole everyone else knows about the tax is pretty damn high. But please, explain…

I was a landlord and of course I had insurance.
My tenant didn’t pay his rent for a year and trashed the place. I couldn’t evict him.
No way my insurance was covering me for that!

The private rental market is just that - a market, like any other market. You can’t blame landlords for competition and demand.
If you get a bad landlord - that’s shit and you should move.

Changes to the system have to come from the top down.

What is rent control in the US - and how did.does that work?

@LardyDee - tax evasion by landlords was trivial thoughout the early 2000s. HMRC's systems have got better, but they've moved onto avoidance now by incorporating.

I don't need to look it up, because the figures aren't there. HMRC don't publish the data. But fag packet arithmetic should tell you that the tax revenue gained on landlord profits is likely to be a trivial amount Vs the benefit bill.

I was lucky enough to benefit from a 100% mortgage when I graduated university, I really think they should be available for people who have shown they consistently pay rent, it would help so many people.

I can see what you're saying, but TBH it's not their fault if your circumstances aren't right to buy a house.

I've lived in my home since it was built, it actually works out that the neighbours have paid less including their deposit at this point as I have in rent.

It's just shit that I didn't have the deposit to start with.

Also can't really blame the landlord, he pays for repairs, he has insurances. He had adequate provisions to keep a roof over our head during the pandemic if we couldn't pay rent (we did but we were concerned that we wouldn't be able to when we went into lockdown!)
We've never had to wait too long for repairs, we have always felt that concerns about the house were taken seriously and cleared up quickly.

It smarts paying more for the same home as our neighbours, and it's wasted money, but ultimately much of our situation is down to life circumstance and that's no one else's fault

House prices are insane. Houses being chopped up into horrible HMO and charging per room what a whole house was 5 years ago. All insane.

Lending continues at silly rates.

How to deal with it? Govt doesn't want to crash the housing market. Too much money lent on houses. But it's almost the whole economy (almost, that and coffee shops)

@Nothappyatwork I meant without the deposits .. I know how mortgages work ! If you can prove you haven't missed a payment and can pay thr mortgage thrn get rid of the deposit part . We didn't need one when we bought our first house and we had nothing .

I think if the rent on a property exceeds the standard mortgage rate for that property at the price it was purchased for or is within plus or minus 10% of that amount (so nobody could purposely charge £1 less), renters should be given a percentage of the property each time they make a payment equal to the amount of the mortgage they'd paid off & councils who've paid housing benefit on a property should get the same deal.

Like to see the leeches who make a living as landlords charging more than the cost of buying the property deal with that.
Suck the life from your tenant by making them pay for you to own a property or keep rents at a fairer price.

Would also sort out the massive lack of council housing because the council would own so many properties after 25 years.

Housing benefit should be spent on purchasing properties which the councils would then have in the future for low cost social housing, not giving rich people the chance to abuse poor people in their 'investment property'.

Once I factor in expenses I earn around 3k a year on my investment of £100000. That's 3 percent

Sell up now. My shares are doing far better than that.

I do think the scarcity in housing that successive governments have allowed to develop means that landlords can profiteer, and have been able to do so for several decades.

There are, of course, plenty of costs associated with being a landlord, but rental prices have made it, on average, an unreasonably high yield investment.

The government needs to do more to prevent price gouging (which is what landlords in some areas are effectively involved in) in the short term and in the long term increase availability of housing of the type people need in the places they need it (or providing more of the facilities people need - like good schools and decent public transport links to places with jobs) in more places that already have housing.

I agree Op. it sucks. I will never have a home. I might at times have a house to rent and a roof over my head but it isn't and won't ever be a home. Landlords can and do boot you out for no reason beyond that they feel like it!
I have just been diagnosed with cancer. Followed almost instantly by a section 21. They wont and don't have to tell me why I am loosing my home. But I have good reason to believe it's because someone else has offered them more for this house.
I'm self employed and with no current reliable income due to my illness I won't be offered even viewings by estate agents despite having a guarantor.
I'm done and don't know how I can carry on. I've been suicidal recently. And that is purely down to the greed of my landlord.

@Jobseeker19

I have yet to meet a landlord who pays insurance.

Hi I'm elfycat, a LL who pays insurance, all my gas safety certs, and went round with 30 mins notice to unblock a drain for him (fat 50 year old woman kneeling in drain water).

We're not all shits.

I agree, I worked out that over my years of private renting it was about 30k?! Makes me sick but I Was never in a position to buy so it was my only option for a very long time, until the rent kept going up and I couldn't afford it and was eventually made homeless

@Chestofdraws

You realise from that eight hundred the landlord pays tax, insurance and has to also pay all repairs? And if you had a 450 mortgage, you’d also need insurance, buildings, and you’d have to cover all repairs yourself right? Although granted you’d not pay tax. What is it you find unfair?

Lots of landlords don't do repairs and get away with renting out slums cos not enough social housing. Tenant can't complain cos landlord can evict so then tenant dies homeless on streets or in unsafe temporary housing slum.

Landlords don't need to be landlords, not human right, but tenants need homes is human right.

Landlord even if paying repairs mortgage will have big money income from selling in future when old. Tenant pays lots and lots of money years to landlord but faces dying in homeless slum when old.

People victim blame why domestic violence victim dont leave, they say it's cos of police. Not cos of police it's cos landlords except slum ones won't take tenants on benefits which is lots of single mums and disabled. No safe homes so domestic violence murders happen.